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Intro
Hello, my name is Tim Jones
What are you working on these days?
I'm building HelloHailey.io to help coworkers on distributed teams strengthen personal connections. And I'm sharing everything in public in a process I'm calling The MVP Sprint - https://www.themvpsprint.com/. I'll be sharing all my decisions, product strategies, success, and failures.
What can the WIP community help you with right now?
Since I'm building a product for remote, distributed teams, I need insights from remote workers. How do you stay connected with remote team members distributed across time zones?
What can you help others with?
In past lives, I've been a YC founder, head of growth, engineer, and product manager. I can help with product strategy, fundraising, a *little* bit of sales/marketing, and Rails development.
Something else you want to share?
After 4 brain surgeries in 2 months (Dec/Jan '20) and a long medical leave, I left my job as a PM in SF to go full-time as an Indie Hacker. I'm planning to travel the world while building my startup as soon as it's safe to do so. I'd love to connect with other WIP'ers on Twitter - @anothertimjones.
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Hey Tim and welcome to WIP!
You seem to put a lot of effort into The MVP Sprint. I'm curious how you find the time while also building the actual product itself? Or do you consider it as a marketing channel for it as well?
I know many indie makers struggle marketing their product (opposed to building something), but "building in public" is become more and more common. I, and I'm sure many with me, am curious to more about how fruitful writing about your progress has been and if you've been able to quantify the ROI of it?
Thanks, Marc!
My initial motivation was twofold: (1) Build an audience that I can funnel into the product I'm building (as you said), and (2) Build lasting equity in something that I can take with me even if this idea fails.
A third benefit has been huge for me - building in public has given me external motivation to make progress every week. It's also forced me to articulate my thoughts and justify my decisions. I had to do this as a product manager when I had a boss, but you can easily get by without it as a solo founder.
I'll probably shift eventually to a 2-week sprint schedule. I can easily justify spending 25%+ of my time writing updates and promoting my content if it turns out to be a primary marketing channel.
A month into it, I have ~45k article reads, almost 500 subscribers, and about 50-60 waitlist signups for my product.
In terms of ROI - these are really just vanity metrics until I get paying users, so we'll see. I'm going to start building in a couple weeks and timebox an MVP to a month or less.
Makers perfect sense. I also like the manager example. I've never had a manager, but since I started hiring people I've become a better planner. I need to assign them tasks, so I need to think more strategically whereas if you're working just by yourself you can go weeks or even months doing busy work without really thinking about the bigger picture.
Hey @timjones, nice to meet you!
Hope everything is okay today, after all those surgeries 🙏
2020 is probably not the best year to travel, unfortunately, I guess 2021 will be YOUR year!
Thanks, Florian! Yes I'm optimistic about 2021 for sure. I actually applied for a Taiwanese gold card visa - hoping to ride out COVID there starting in January!
Hey Tim, welcome to WIP and nice to meet you 🤗
You are crazily strong and optimistic. Just connected you on Twitter and hope to hear more updates from you. Best wishes 🙏
Thanks a lot, Damon! Just followed you back. Love the idea behind IndieLog